This from the guy who was notorious for hitting (manipulating) his quarterly numbers for decades. To be fair I guess, if anyone, he is eminently qualified to spot this type of behavior it would be him.

Are you actually saying that the government numbers are NOT manipulated???

Are you saying that they are? I.e., that the number just published was not a simple computation from collected data following the same procedures and techniques which have been used in reporting all prior equivalent numbers?

Recognize that this is very different than saying this particular computation is not the best reflection of the unemployment situation. One can make the case for several metrics, each telling us something slightly different. Of course, one can't use one computation for Obama and a different one for Bush since that wouldn't give a meaningful comparison.

Any jobs report is more than one number and, in fact, there is more than one report. Just as one should look at more than one poll, one should look at the overall pattern of the data to get a more accurate idea of what it all means. A couple of tidbits from:http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/jobs-new...

...Last month, for instance, the government estimated that 386,000 more jobs than it had originally reported were created between April 2011 and March 2012, or about 32,000 per month....Jobs figures were revised upward by 40,000 in July, and by 46,000 in August. Combined with the jobs growth in September, that means the economy added 200,000 more jobs than we thought previously.... the household survey also reflected genuinely good news in September. According to that survey, 413,000 workers joined the labor force in September. But 873,000 more people became employed, causing the unemployment rate to fall to 7.8 percent....The firm ADP, which tracks private-sector payrolls, had reported that an average of 170,000 private-sector jobs had been created each month so far this year. The ADP reports are much maligned because they do not always match the government’s payroll figures over the short run. But in the long run, the numbers tend to converge....An average of 146,000 jobs have been created per month over the past year, or closer to 157,000 with the government’s anticipated benchmark revisions accounted for.

Those aren’t great numbers by any means, and would translate to an annualized growth rate of 1.4 percent. But over the past 25 years, payroll jobs have grown at an annualized rate of 1.1 percent, or the equivalent of about 125,000 jobs added per month given today’s population....The decline in unemployment under Mr. Obama this year since December is the largest in an election year since Ronald Reagan’s re-election bid, when it declined to 7.3 percent in Sept. 1984 from 8.3 percent in Dec. 1983....